


Drifting in from Distant Shores

by elegantanagram (Lir)



Series: HSWC 2014 Bonus Round Fills [11]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Assassination, Curses, Dread Pirate Vriska Serket, Empress Feferi Peixes, F/F, Historical Fantasy, Magic, Minor Character Death, POV Third Person, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 20:34:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1831357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lir/pseuds/elegantanagram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Empress, Feferi learned to fake it, with a smile and kind words and the sheer, overwhelming force of her positive attitude, imitating competency until her performance alone transformed her into a capable ruler. Now she fakes another competency, swimming out to the Dread Pirate Serket's ship and holding her dagger tight once she boards, because the role of an assassin may be ill-fitting but she isn't too weak to protect her position with her own two hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drifting in from Distant Shores

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phidari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phidari/gifts).



> Written for the first bonus round of the 2014 [Homestuck Shipping World Cup.](http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/) The prompt was "Remember when the dread pirate Serket met the empress, who was hiding her identity for some reason?"
> 
> I took this as an opportunity to create a whole non-Alternia, alternate-universe, still-trolls society, complete with magic and subterfuge and a plot against the empress. My idea was probably a bit ambitious for the space I wanted to tell the story in, but it was a lot of fun to write nevertheless -- especially since I'd never written from Feferi's POV before.

-

It's just after moonrise as Feferi swims out toward the ship. She's hardly been in water since her youth, enough years ago that the time has begun to take on the uncertain cast of a dream, but if there's one thing to be said about swimming it's that the body never forgets. She cuts cleanly through the water, not needing to surface at all. In the present day her gills are a badge and a cross, something she bears emblazoned upon her as a visible symbol of the responsibility strung weightily around her neck. An Empress has no time to be swimming, and a seatroll of any standing no longer has time for the sea.

But Feferi remembers just how to let the water flow through her gills, and the cradle of the ocean washes over her like a caress as she wriggles through it with the fluid agility of a sailfish. 

She gets as far as the ship's longboat at last, an effort that's genuine exercise, with the ship nearly a league out to sea. The boat is slung low against the galleon's side, and she flops over its edge like a hooked fish, beaching herself with an absence of grace. She squirms around in the bottom of the boat until she can shrug off the oiled pack she'd slung against her back. It resisted her in the water but she knew that she needed it, and now she pulls it open beneath the tarpaulin stretched over the boat – thank goodness for small blessings, something to shield her from sight while she changes! – and pulls out her disguise. 

Dressing is slow going. Oh, pulling on the clothes is quick, breaches and a thin linen undershirt and a dingy oversized jacket, all in dirty, dark colors to match with the sorts of men who wind up outlaw crew. She laces up her boots with care, unwilling to stint on those because if she's caught, shoes that fit will be vital. But pinning down her fins, then covering them up with loops of her own hair as she winds it together atop her head, that's delicate work and she cringes when her own efforts cause the thin membranes to pinch and pull at the tines. It hurts, and twice she has to stop entirely as the shocks from the nerves stab all the way down her spine with searing-white pain that briefly paralyzes her. She soldiers on, pulling a cap over her hair at last to hold it in place.

The worst, though, is sealing up her gills. They stay closed when she's on land – which is nearly always, these days – and it will cause her no damage to have them covered. Not in terms of breathing. But she uses them for sensing, in a way she can hardly articulate, a sixth sense that's closer to a hybrid of touch and sight than something new altogether, a sense for feeling the space around her for electrical impulses, or some other arcane, invisible force. As she slicks the cool, clammy putty over her gills, smearing it all around and smoothing it out as it starts to dry, it feels as if a thick, suffocating veil is lowering over her eyes. She can still see the expanse of the ocean stretching out to the horizon, and the purple shape of the moon peeking higher into the sky, but it feels as if the color has gone dingy and unkind. 

It feels like someone is squeezing her throat but the hands are phantoms and nothing she does will make them let up, so she simply must grin and bear it until the feeling passes. She tries it for a moment, baring her teeth with bitter joy out at the sea. It does lift her spirits once again, but she has work to do. 

She grasps the chains suspending the boat from the side of the larger ship, puts the toe of one boot snugly into a link, and begins to climb. 

Feferi chose moonrise to do this, because there's no risk of full day breaking and catching her unprotected in the act, but if she's lucky everyone of importance will still be in their bunk. The word she has is that whoever is captain of the ship has gone into town – disguised just like her, of course, because who would socialize with a pirate if they knew any better – but that doesn't matter to her. She's not looking for the captain. It's simply good news, because with the captain and several of their officers gone, there's less danger of her being caught out before she acts. She'll make her kill, and be gone. 

She can feel the man she's hunting, now that she's gotten herself this close. The magic on her tugs at her nerves, or at something else rooted deep in her core, as if they've become magnets. She's attuned to him now, and as long as he's close he'll never escape her. She pads across the deck as if she belongs there, with a little skip in her step because nothing sells a lie like playing it for truth. That she knows from ruling – right at the beginning of her reign, she'd been little more than a kitten in the afterbirth, unprotected and untried, without the faintest clue how to walk on her new feet let alone take charge. 

She faked it, with a smile and kind words and the sheer, overwhelming force of her positive attitude, and no one had ever questioned her legitimacy for a minute. 

Feferi descends below decks, walking slower as the pull grows stronger. She's hesitant now, dagger in hand with the blade flipped up alongside her wrist so she at least won't stab a stranger until she means to. But she needs the curse off of her more than she needs clean hands. She pushes open the door to the last bunk on the narrow, wood-lined hall, slowly, slowly, so the old hinges, if not oiled, won't creak. She can feel him there, pulsing like a sickly, slowed-down heartbeat, and more than anything she doesn't want him to startle. She'd rather it be clean. 

What she isn't counting on is the fact that he, too, can sense her through their lifeline. 

He's hiding against the wall beside the door, and as soon as she pushes it as wide as she's willing, as soon as she stares into the tiny, deceptively empty room, he makes a break for it. He's an ash-gray streak in tattered, dirtier-gray rags, and he runs faster than she could have imagined down the narrow hall toward the ladder leading above decks. 

Feferi turns and gives chase without a thought.

She's done it now, there's no going undetected with him kicking up such a fuss, throwing himself at the wooden wall and rebounding off it so fast that the impact must have magically given him speed instead of absorbing momentum. She tears after him, quick on the well-worn soles of her leather boots, the jacket of her disguise flying behind her like a pennant flag, like ragged wings. 

He gets to the ladder and begins to climb, quick like a monkey, but Feferi is right behind him. She tries to grab his ankle when she catches up but he yanks it away, scrambling onto the deck and forcing her, too, to climb. She bursts onto the deck in a flurry of righteous rage and poorly-banked indignation, spinning around to catch sight of which way her quarry has gone. In her short time below decks, the crew has emerged from shadows, countless trolls now visible perched in the rigging and leaning on the masts, a few more lazy fellows propped against the railing near the stern. Feferi consults the tug inside of her to know which way her prey has gone, because she's never clearly seen his face. 

She sights him, crouched behind some crates on the deck, his lips moving fast in a way that spikes her adrenaline far more than if she'd seen him pulling a weapon. He knows the instant she spots him because he spooks, breaking of the incantation and bolting again. 

The ship only has so much ground for them to play tag-turned-hide-and-seek on, and Feferi is certain she'll end their game of cat and mouse and see it through. There's nothing like a seatroll's stamina, and she knows at least that he comes nowhere near to matching her hue. She watches him jump, calculating distances and angles on her body's intuition, preparing just the right moment to spring and intersect him, when--

He slams right into a body that hadn't been there only the second before, considering the troll he's collided with has just leapt down from the rigging, light as a cat. She catches him by the throat, striking like a viper, and Feferi watches her fingers squeeze mercilessly tight. 

"I'm all for a little fun and games!" she crows, scratchy-edged voice carrying easily across the entire breadth of the deck. "But don't you think it's a bit _rude_ to get up to this despicable sort of foolery and not invite the captain of the ship?" 

Feferi's prey blanches in the captain's grip, both of his hands scrabbling at her fist. His claws cut into her fingers but they're so bony he must be failing to do any damage, or she must be so vicious she hardly cares when she's hurt. She stares down at him, eyes cold and lips pulled manic-wide, painted a vivid, electrical blue that fairly glows against her face. "Stop that," she says, like scolding a wiggler who'd found adults and thought he was big, cuffing the side of his face with the knuckles of her free hand. "I thought I asked you a question?" 

She doesn't wait for him, despite her demand, her sharp eyes lifting up and latching on Feferi in the exact way of a predator scenting its next, easy meal. Her grin ticks a hair wider. 

Feferi remembers hearing once, from one of her advisers, that only a crazy person grins when she is angry. She wonders if the captain is insane, or simply ruthless – the way she treats someone she at least considered till then to be her own crew suggests it's both. She wonders if it's too late to kill the plotter in anonymous bloodshed, or whether her identity is truly blown. 

"If you won't tell me," the captain begins, looking straight at Feferi but speaking to the man with her grin slowly fading from her face, "it seems there's someone else who's got the news. Too bad for you! Maybe if you'd spoken up, you'd have gotten to live."

There's the merest pause for breath in the middle of her last sentence, the lot of it delivered with the carelessness of casual conversation. It almost fails to register not so much as a threat, but a promise of death. Between the breath and her conclusion, the captain draws her sword, running the man right through his heart without ever letting go of his neck. 

She holds him, as he jerks, and shudders, and dies. She holds him right there at barely arm's length, where she can clearly feel the struggles draining out of him just as his blood drains, seeping, from his wound. When he's still – it takes hardly more than a minute, the captain must have gotten a very precise pin on the center of his vasculars, but still an entire minute while everyone on the deck must listen to him choke and gurgle – she yanks her sword free. One decisive jerk, and then the blood spurts heavily, his heart still having that last little bit to give. She drops him to the deck like it's nothing. 

Feferi stares at his corpse, and despairs. 

"So, missy," the captain drawls, wiping her hands down the front of her coat after she rises from wiping her sword on the dead man's clothes, re-sheathing it smoothly at her side. She strolls across the deck, her heavy boots making the only sound in hearing, one heavy footfall after another. "I believe you, at least, still owe me an explanation. Or at least, you're the one with the blood in her veins and the breath to give me one. What are you troublemakers doing on my ship?" 

Feferi stares at her, with the captain now no more than three feet away, her eyes gone wide and pleading. She's an Empress, and she does not beg, but this time it hardly matters – because she isn't able. She can feel the invisible hands on her throat but they aren't the problem – the curse, with the treacherous magician dead, will she never see it lifted? 

But as the captain eyes her over, bright eyes – the vividest blue against creamy golden yellow irises – looking her over from top to toe and not hesitating to linger over every last suggestion of curves underneath her clothes, she feels the stranglehold on her voicebox start to ease. It's like a single, clean breath after being trapped in a maze of smoke and fire, her lungs filling what feels more deeply than she's managed in perigees on end. She opens her lips, and her voice comes out rusty with disuse, but unmistakable. 

"I came after that man," she pronounces. "To bring him to justice." 

The captain arches her heavy brows – she hasn't a pretty face, handsome is far more accurate a word, her features too angular and rough to evoke beauty – and laughs. "Looks like justice is already done. Do I need to 'justice' you too?" 

"Hardly!" Feferi says, loud and bright like it's a funny thought. She's outnumbered thirty to one, and that's not counting anyone and everyone still below decks or who might be coming back from shore, but she keeps her back straight, and holds her head high. Like hell or horrorterrors is she afraid of anything as ordinary as pirates. "You've done my work for me, so if it's all the same to you, I'd like to go back to land." 

"How are you going to do that?" the captain asks, more curious than condescending. "Swim?" 

"I could!" Feferi says. 

It's clicked, at last, with the captain right up in her face, that this is the dread pirate, Vriska Serket. With the woman staring at her so unflinchingly, Feferi almost hadn't noticed, but at last the tear in Vriska's eye registers, and she remembers tales of the pirate who saw with one eye things most trolls didn't see with two. There were legends about Vriska, though she wasn't yet dead, tales about supernatural powers and her carelessly cruel ways. She was likely the very last pirate the Empress of Alternia should be revealing her identity to, lest she desire to become the assassinated rather than the assassin. 

She pulls off her hat anyway, and lets down her hair. She hisses when she unseals her fins with two quick jerks of her hand, but then they flutter free of their bindings, the pale pink in their membranes unimpeachable proof of her identity. 

"But I'd like it much betta if you'd row me back to shore in one of your boats," she continues.

She's honestly expecting the captain to draw her sword, and is relying on her quick reflexes to get herself out of that jam. She thinks she can dive overboard faster than Vriska can stab her, and once she's in the water it's no contest. Unless Vriska plans on turning the ship after her or firing at her with the cannons, in the water she has all of the advantages. 

Feferi is surprised when Vriska just laughs instead, with an amusement that sounds far less cruel than before, to Feferi's not-untrained ears. 

"You've got pluck, Empress," she says, cheerfully. "I'll row you all the way to the capital myself if you just ask pretty please, how about that?" 

"Pretty please," Feferi says. 

Empresses don't beg, but this is hardly begging. It's more like one of those wiggler's callback games, "repeat after me and don't mess up!" She's getting her way, against all odds, and she very much feels like she's playing. Heck, she feels like she's winning. 

"Like I said," Vriska resumes, strolling around beside her and throwing her arm across Feferi's shoulders. She starts steering them toward the boats, physically moving her companion. "You've got spunk, and I like that. On the way back to the capital, how about you and me talk about your issuing me a pardon?" 

"We can talk," Feferi shrugs, grinning brightly. "But no promises aboat me doing anyfin for you!" 

"What are promises to a pirate?" Vriska chuckles. "I don't need that, you'll see. I always get my man." 

As Vriska's crew lowers them down to the water, after Vriska has helped her over the rail and into the craft with a hand up like any highblooded gentleman would do for her at the palace, it dawns on Feferi that this is the most fun she's had in a good long while. Perhaps for lifting her curse, she may have to repay the pirate captain after all. 

-

-


End file.
